Month: November 2005

Gwen Harwood Prize 2005

A small crowd has gathered at Hobart Bookshop for the announcement of the winner of the Gwen Harwood Prize. Island’s editor David Owen welcomes guests, thanks judges Adrienne Eberhard and Kevin Gillam, “two individuals far apart – Kevin in Perth, Western Australia, Adrienne here in Hobart – a distance that could of course cause difficulties, but then again … maybe it’s a positive!”

David introduces Sarah Day, who describes the background to the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize. Gwen was born in Queensland in 1920, raised and educated in Brisbane and in 1945 moved to Tasmania with her husband William – a move she did not at first appreciate. But her life here became immensely rewarding and productive, not least being mother to four children. And over a thirty-year period she published seven highly acclaimed volumes of poetry including The Lion’s Bride, In Plato’s Cave, Bone Scan and two Selected Poems. “Gwen Harwood is justly considered a major twentieth-century English language poet and it’s therefore all the more rewarding to be able to announce this year’s winners of this prestigious prize established in her name”.

Sarah announces the three Minor Prizes: first runner up Carolyn Fisher for ‘A Life of Birds’. “Carolyn lives in Ulverstone. It’s always very pleasing to have a Tasmanian poet recognised in this prestigious national award. She is here this evening and will shortly red ‘A Life of Birds’.”

“The second runner up is Ray Liversidge for ‘The Divorce Papers’. Ray Liversidge is a Melbourne poet whose first book of poetry, Obeying the Call, was published by Ginninderra Press in 2003. His verse novel The Barrier Range will be published next year by Flat Chat Press.”

“The third runner up is Lucy Holt for ‘The Love-doggedness Sonnets – Part I’. Lucy is a twenty-three year old poet who lives in Brunswick, Victoria. Her collection Stories of Bird was published earlier this year by the Poets Union.”

“I have much pleasure,” Sarah continues, “in announcing that the winner of the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize for 2005 is Mark Tredinnick for ‘The Child & Time’. Mark is an essayist, poet, critic and writing teacher. He lives both in Katoomba and in Sydney, NSW. His books include The Land’s Wild Music, published this year, and the forthcoming landscape memoir The Blue Plateau. He is also the editor of A Place on Earth: An Anthology of Nature Writing from Australia and North America. Mark teaches creative nonfiction, nature writing, ecology and literature, business writing, composition and grammar in the University of Sydney’s continuing education program and elsewhere. His work will be familiar to readers of Island: his essay ‘Days of Christmas’ won the 2005 Wildcare Tasmania Nature Writing Prize, and he will in fact soon be in residence at Lake St Clair, as part of that prize winner’s package.”

“As we did last year, with the winner not from Tasmania, the winning poem is read out on the winner’s behalf. This evening John Hale, well known stage actor and good friend of Island magazine, will read ‘The Child & Time’.”

John Hale makes his way to the front of the room – “I’m an actor & I need a stage!” – noting how pleased he is to be faced with a small crowd this evening. “I’ve read Mark’s poem, and think it best felt in a room where there’s a sense of intimacy and perhaps a shared bottle of wine. It’s the kind of poem suggestive of whispers in a lover’s ear, a poem of intimacy and of great beauty.”

David Owen rounds off the evening with ‘Thanks John. I only wish we’d had a recorder here to tape your rendition of Mark’s poem’.

North to Garradunga: An afternoon at the Republic

Various things draw me to Hobart’s Republic Hotel this afternoon, not least the fact that Pete Hay is reading today. Compere Liz Winfield opens proceedings with work by Barney Roberts and Magenta Bliss (Jenny Boult), a recital that both renews our appreciation of their respective talents and accentuates our  loss. Some of us are making the trip to Launceston for Bliss’ funeral next Thursday.  Continuing on a happier note, Liz announces the results of this year’s Bruce Dawe Poetry Prize. ‘Last year as you’ll remember, it was won by Louise Oxley, this year it’s the turn of Jane Williams.’ Both women are among the audience for the afternoon’s readings.

First to the microphone is visitor Shaun Levin – originally South African but now a resident of London – and Hobart City Council’s International Writer in residency. ‘Much of my work is about love, and sex,’ he says, ‘which I’m missing cos I haven’t been home for three weeks…’

‘But you’re open to offers, right?’ calls some wit from the audience.

Levin grins without missing a beat. He’s the editor of Chroma, a queer literary journal publishing work from writers and visual artists based in the UK. This afternoon he reads from his recent novella, Seven Sweet Things – his writing is funny, droll, in-your-face.

Next to read is local writer Kathryn Lomer. She’d missed the last reading at the Republic, she explained, having been hospitalised for a few days with a life-threatening illness. Kathryn mentioned the name of the illness, ‘something to do with the colon’ she said, adding that investigation had led her to realise the poet A.D Hope had suffered from the same affliction. ‘We both underwent life-saving operations … saved his life, saved mine. Hope went on to write about his. “I’ve always been partial to a colon; but a semi-colon is better than a full stop.”

Lomer reads from old and new work, including ‘Heart to heart’ published in the most recent issue of Island (no. 102), and displaying her effortless capacity to write of the trials of the heart – ‘… parts of our hearts already comatose/ from long-ago mishaps in love’. As she offers words to the microphone I wonder again at the sheer quality of her first collection An Extraction of Arrows (UQP), the winner of the Anne Elder Award and short-listed for the 2004 Adelaide Writers’ Festival. (How difficult is that, faced with competition from every decent poetry collection published in the country over the preceding two years?)

The experience of motherhood is never far from Kathryn’s consciousness, it comes out in her writing, in her conversation. ‘I think we could learn from a survey of four-year-olds on their recollections of the experience of birth,’ she says in response to something raised by Shaun Levin, the previous reader. “I asked my son what he remembered about his birth. His immediate response was, “It was too dark, then I slid down a slide and Mummy bit me” ’. (Do our children ever forgive their writer parents for any of this, Kathryn wonders?).

Another poem is dedicated to Anne Morgan, ‘who put me on to kayaking’. It’s a poem from what she hopes will be her second collection ‘by a publisher who’s intimated they may be able to publish it …  in 2007’. It’s funny, Lomer adds, ‘people always tell me this is a great poem about relationships but it’s really just a poem about kayaking’.

I can’t help thinking how good an experience it’d be to publish Lomer myself, if only I had the resources. The things that matter most in the relationship between a press and the work it publishes – the things that make a book effortless and natural to promote – is always apparent to me when listening to Kathryn read her work, it’s in her earthiness, in the lack of self-consciousness about her writing, in her lively imagination.

Pete Hay introduces a sombre note to proceedings. Remarking on the passing of Magenta Bliss (Jenny Boult) this week, he mentioned how he’d had the privilege of delivering the eulogy at the funeral of Barney Roberts a little time ago. “Scott, Roberts, Bliss in the past three months … we’re losing too many fine poets, too fast’, he laments.

Hay reads from his recent collection Silently on the Tide, the poetry spilling out from this much loved man of letters. Of the thylacine, he reads:

The tiger is an absence, and here’s a marvel.
In the common soul wells a mourning,
a sense of an essence lost from the land
and we have made it so.
We have rendered the land incomplete
and it is not to be redeemed.
It is the very land that grieves, perhaps,
gathering us up.

Hay – generous as ever – makes mention of the presence of Cameron Hindrum in the audience. Cameron, the Director of the annual Tasmanian Poetry Festival,  is in Hobart to present Jenny Barnard with the Poetry Cup she’d won at the festival. ‘Cameron’s an extremely good link-man’, Hay says, adding that like a good many other people ‘I got my ass kicked by Jenny in the Cup’. He finishes his set with a wry smile and some welcome new work. ‘The book goes on, becomes part of history … and the poet moves on, to the next.’

Hindrum is welcomed to the microphone. ‘The Launceston Poetry Cup has escaped Launceston,’ he says mournfully, ‘has come to Hobart for the first time since Tony Rayner lifted it in 1997’. The Cup is duly presented – ‘it’s yours for a year Jenny, no wild parties with it’ – and there’s opportunity for Jenny to read her prize-winning piece.

Liz Winfield takes a few moments to launch the latest issue of Poets Republic, the bi-monthly A3 poetry broadsheet she’s faithfully produced for the past two years. It’s a freebie, five hundred copies of it are distributed by literary organisations and bookshops throughout Tasmania. ‘This issue marks its second anniversary,’ she says, ‘the next one will appear early in the new year”.

It’s been a good afternoon.